Elder, author, storyteller, ritual priestess. Chief priestess of Ọ̀ṣun in the Yoruba Lucumí tradition. Founder and Chief Spiritual Director of the Jambalaya Center of Ancient Mysteries & Sacred Arts. For more than four decades Yeye has carried the wisdom of African diasporic spirituality into rooms, books, and ceremonies across the world — and now onto five acres of sacred land in the Russian River corridor.
Yeye is an Iyanifa in the Ifá / Òrìṣà tradition of the West African diaspora. She holds the chieftaincy title Yeye'woro from the Fatunmise Compound in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria — the ancestral seat of Yoruba spiritual tradition — where she was initiated into her lineage as Iyanifa Fajembola Fatunmise.
She is a chief priestess of Ọ̀ṣun in the Yoruba Lucumí tradition and a devotee of Damballah Hwedo, the Haitian rainbow serpent, under the guidance of Mambo Marie Carmel Charles — Momma Lola. Her spiritual formation also includes early initiation into the Fahamme Temple of Amun-Ra (1969), and later study with Indigenous North and South American traditions under Sun Bear's tribal elders at Medicine Wheels.
Yeye is the author of Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals, first published in 1985 by Harper & Row and now in a refreshed edition from HarperOne. A women's spirituality classic and foundational text in African diasporic religious studies, Jambalaya has been translated into German, French, and Spanish, and is available as an audiobook narrated by Yeye herself.
Alice Walker described Jambalaya as a book of remembrances, revelations, and directives filled with the wisdom of the African religion of the Mother — a book to be read with the same open-minded love with which it was written.
Her other published works include Carnival of the Spirit: Seasonal Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Jump Up: Good Times Throughout the Seasons with Celebrations from Around the World; What Don't Kill Is Fattening Revisited: Twenty Years of Poetry, Prose, and Myth; and her most recent collection, A Calabash of Cowries: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times (2022). Her writing has appeared in Ms., Essence, SageWoman, Yoga Journal, Shaman's Drum, and more than fifteen anthologies. Her book Jump Up is used as a text on the mythology of the goddess María Lionza at La Casa de la Poesía in Caracas, Venezuela.
Yeye has taught since 1977. Her workshops, ceremonies, keynotes, and lectures have moved through spiritual and academic circles around the world — Bioneers, the Shift Network, universities, sacred-land gatherings, women's spirituality retreats, interfaith councils. Her teaching centers ancestral connection, ecological reverence, storytelling as sacred transmission, and the celebration of life's cycles as ceremony.
She earned a Ph.D. in Spiritual Therapeutics from Open International University's School of Complementary Medicine in Colombo, Sri Lanka (1993), and holds an Inter-Faith minister's license from the International Institute of Integral Human Sciences.
Beyond her own lineage work, Yeye has served as Chair of the World Òrìṣà Congress Committee on Women's Issues, and as head of the Elders' Council of Ilé Orunmila Ọ̀ṣun — the multi-racial, multi-cultural network of artists, ritualists, and spiritual advisors that grew around her teaching. She is widely recognized as one of the most significant voices in African diasporic sacred arts of the last half-century.
Yeye is Founder and Chief Spiritual Director of the Jambalaya Center of Ancient Mysteries & Sacred Arts. She lives on the five acres in Guerneville where the Center makes its home — the unceded territory of the Pomo and Coast Miwok — and her presence on the land is the center of gravity for the Ile's ceremonial life.
The Center was co-founded in spiritual partnership with her goddaughter Shylah Hamilton-Touré, Executive Director and Oludari of Egbe Egungun. Together, alongside the Igbimo Ijinle and Apena Council, they are building an institutional home for Indigenous African diasporic spiritual tradition — a seven-generation project of land stewardship, curriculum, and lineage transmission rooted in Yoruba Ifá, Egungun, and Akan Sankofa cosmologies.
Yeye was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father, Wilson Allen, Sr., was African Methodist Episcopal; her mother, Serena "Rene" Allen, was Catholic with Haitian, French, and Choctaw heritage. Her ancestral lineage runs through Yoruba West African, Haitian, French, and Choctaw roots — the many rivers that run through her name and her work.
In the late 1960s she was a dancer in Katherine Dunham's company, where she trained in traditional African and Caribbean forms. She went on to lead the dance troupe of the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis, choreographing for community and stage. She took the name Luisah Teish — "adventuresome spirit" — upon her initiation in 1969.
"All roads lead to paradise when you know how to walk."
— Yeye Luisah Teish
Yeye maintains her own site at yeyeluisahteish.com, where she offers spiritual consultations, hosts her Patreon community, and shares upcoming teachings, appearances, and writings.
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